[SciPy-User] multi-dimensional scaling

[Zachary Pincus]

> I'm looking in scipy for something to perform multi-dimensional 
> scaling*. I don't see anything - have I missed it? Is it easy to make it 
> from scipy components?
> 
> Thanks
> Dan
> 
> * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_scaling


MDS is more a class of approaches than a specific algorithm. If you want to do "classic" MDS with euclidian distances as the metric, then you would use PCA to implement that:
http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/14002/whats-the-difference-between-principal-components-analysis-and-multidimensional

And PCA is just a simple eigendecomposition that you can build from the basic linear algebra tools in numpy. I'm happy to send over the short wrapper code I wrote to do "PCA" on data in a vaguely smart way, if you want.

Zach